I LOVE YOU.

If you meet an individual and you have strong feelings toward this individual, how soon is it safe to say, “I Love You?” Let’s also add another scenario, you meet an individual, you two have established a relationship based upon sex and you love having sex with this individual and vice versa, is it safe to say I love you then? Is it safe to say I love you after, lets say 1, 2, or maybe even 3 months into your relationship?

I’m no Dr. Love and I’m not going to say there is a time limit or a waiting period for you to say those 3 words. I will say, that the 3 word phrase is overused in today’s society. For example, when I say I love you to a close friend, that person is family to me, also because that person and I have been through some rough times together. It’s crazy how getting shot at or having rockets shot at you, elevates your friendship to another level, because that person depends on you and you depend on that person as well.

I will admit, when I met my wife I knew she was going to be the one I would marry. I felt it the first time we met. This may sound ‘stalkerish’, but I would go to the floor she lived on to check on my soldiers, but I really wasn’t worried about them, I wanted to catch a glance at her and spit game. She tried to play hard to get, but I’m a persistent individual and I wasn’t going to let her slip away from me. We dated for about a year, but 2 months into our relationship I was ready to say I love you. I told myself to wait because I thought it was too early to say it. Another reason why I told myself to wait is, I didn’t want to say it and scare her off, because I was scared of rejection; however at the 4 month mark into our relationship I couldn’t hold it any longer and I finally told her how I felt about her and to my surprise, she felt the same way. It’s an awesome feeling when you find out that she loved you back. I hope that I am making sense. After saying it and knowing she felt the same way, I was relieved.

When I initially arrived at Fort Polk, Louisiana, I did have a girlfriend at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but 3 weeks of being away from her, I received a call from her crying hysterically. Why was she crying? I thought she was hurt physically or something had happened to someone in her family, I kept asking her what was wrong and she would immediately hang up the phone. I knew what was wrong after her 3rd phone call. To make it even more ironic, she cheated on me with an individual that claimed to be a friend of mine. It was crazy. We had been together almost 3 years. I knew it was going to happen, just because of her nature. She needed physical and mental affection. It sucked, I was hurt, because she was someone that I wanted to marry and I was willing to risk my career for.

As for the devastation of my career, I did my best to stop the situation from happening, but my Platoon Sergeant wanted me to stay in the platoon and he would make sure that I didn’t do anything to jeopardize my career. I knew that if I stayed in the Platoon during a deployment, things would be hard, but that’s a different story and I’m getting off the subject at hand. I think that you know your life mate when you meet them. You just know. You have that feeling of butterflies in your stomach and you can feel it. It just feels right. Of course, it’s not going to be easy, because if it were, everybody would be happily married with no issues at all.

Love is a continuous process that you have to actively work on day in and day out. You can’t just say I love you to an individual and expect everything to be easy and everything is going to peachy keen! The past 12 years of being with my wife, I’ve learned that, but I had to learn it the hard way. I’m so glad that my wife had patience and kept me straight. I can honestly say that in the beginning I wasn’t ready to be married, because my priorities were in the wrong order. I wanted to hang out with my boys instead of doing what I needed to do to make sure my family was taken care of. It took her almost leaving me 3 damn times before I finally realized and said to myself, “Hey dumbass, she’s a keeper, you need to pull your head out of your ass and do what’s right for your family.”

I can’t say that there is a time limit or correct time to say I love you. If you know deep in your heart, the person you meet is the one for you then it’s your decision on when saying, “I love you” is appropriate.